Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday April 20, 2010 @11:32AM
from the how-can-tetris-not-be-in-my-spellcheck dept.

kkleiner writes "What's the surest sign that robots aspire to be more like humans? They play video games. The Tetris-Bot operates completely without human interference to play games of old school Tetris on a computer. Creator Branislov Kisacanin patched together a webcam, a digital signaling processing board, and some NXT Lego as a fun educational project for his kids."

But the chemical composition of human beings changes that? You do know that your brain simply processes electrical signals right, and that we've made great strides in using man made robotic components to send signals to the brain, thus furthering the notion that we are not all as different as you seem.

Yes - we've heard it all before, they just run programs. What if we manage the impossible taks of reverse engineering all the things that make being human into a mathematical algorithm and have a robot run the

I dunno. Depends on where you're coming from. If you're a believer in some religions, then no, it's not a life because it doesn't have a soul. But if you're an atheist, then it could be, except it doesn't "die". So I dunno.

That's the difference between man-made and God-made according to most religions. That reminds me of a joke I heard once. A scientist who perfected cloning confronted God one day and said "We don't need you anymore. We can create humans ourselves!" So God challenged him to a contest. If the scientist could create a more perfect man, God would leave. The scientist accepted and proceeded to pick up a handful of dirt. "Wait, wait, wait... hold on a second!" said God, "Get your own dirt!"

You do know that dogs and cats are engineered to get along with humans, by humans, don't you? So if they have a soul, then we have created it. Actually I'll stop fucking about - that comment is moronic beyond all categorisation. You have set yourself up to judge which entities have souls, it just happens to coincide with animals that we've bred to live alongside us, and excludes some "nasty" humans in your opinion.

You do know that dogs more than likely domesticated themselves right? And that cats, according to a lot of scientists and behaviorists, aren't really even domesticated at all?

You also do realize the above comment you're referring to was a "throw-away" comment on an article about a stupid tetris playing lego machine? Right? If not, not really my concern. Moronic comment? Please. I can do much much worse.

IMO... Dogs and cats don't have souls. People don't have souls. Arguing about souls does not actuall

there's the biological definition of life: a few simple rules that apply to (nearly) all that we know of as "living".- it has dna- it reproduces (and can produce at least grandchildren)- it takes in substances and processes it into other substances for nourishment- something something- ???- profit!... waaaait. something went wrong there.

Is it not a life because it doesn't age?
Life is defined scientifically as the ability to utilize resources to sustain oneself. In most basic terms, that makes it seem like a robot could be considered alive, except that it is completely and utterly dependent upon someone else to supply it that resource, and is not able to go out and forage for resources on its own. Some exceptions sort of barely apply.

Life is not defined scientifically, period. It's a perceived property. You can try to define it rigorously, but (as always, outside pure mathematics) there's nothing substantial separating the marginal cases on this or that side of the boundary. For myself, I'm not engaging in any more long-winded arguments about whether virii or fires are alive. If they are, then they hardly are; if they're not, then they almost are. Case closed.

Screw that, I'm hedging my bets by being cool with them now. When the first machines finally become sentient, I'm hoping that they'll recognize that I was their bud all along and not just rip my limbs off like the rest of their former slave masters.

Alright, smarty pants, they'll make tetris blocks out of LEGO® brand building blocks. Probably easier with Duplo or Quadro.

There would have to be a way to limit rotation to only one axis (easy to do with two sheets of plexiglass), and also a way to do the rotation in that axis (much harder with plexiglass in the way). Maybe forget gravity and make the robot "drop" the pieces by holding on to them from the start, then you could switch to a table, and have more stability, also you could use gravity to

Hmm, I clearly shouldn't design LEGO mindstorms tetris games while working; the work is distracting. Unlike a human, the computer could prevent itself from "thinking" about the move while it took extra time away to clear rows by some complicated method, but that makes it a less interesting for humans to watch (which I believe is the ultimate point).

Well, one could use smooth-surface pieces around the Tetris blocks and there would be a hole in the wall at the level of the first block, so a mechanical arm could push the blocks on that line out of field. But that would require something else to hold the blocks together during the fall...

I don't know, but I'm using my lego robotics to cheat at Pokemon. [youtube.com] This is physical, because it's creating artificial motion to pump up my Pokemon-pedometer ("Pokewalker"), thereby circumventing a device designed to get lazy people to move their lazy asses. Who needs exercise when you have SCIENCE!

Dating myself a little here (although this is/., we all date ourselves amirite?), but when I was younger, the Amiga was in my room. For good, most of the time, but occasionally I'd wake up at 3 am and find one or both of my parents hunched over the keyboard, clicking away in the darkness, waiting for that goddamn green one to show up before the stack got too high. They had a pretty serious addiction.

The robot is redundant. Its only task is to press the keys on the keyboard. They could have made it a lot faster, cheaper, and more efficient by simply wiring the output directly to the computer's keyboard input. But that wouldn't involve any unnecessary Lego.

to say that I flee our new robotic overlords! I figure that this can only mean that both the Mayans and John Cameron were partially correct. The end of days will happen in December 2012 like the Mayans predicted, but it will be due to Skynet achieving self awareness, not any kind of cosmic alignment. I have to admit it is sort of sad to see that mankind will be hunted down by terminators constructed from small Danish building blocks, and not the cool steel cyborgs depicted in the films.

I've thought about this back in the days of Pacman and Defender about the feasibility of creating a machine with vision and mechanical access to the controls of a game if it could be taught to play indefinitely (at least for the games that had no real end).

I don't think this is the first time it has been applied to Tetris. But it shouldn't be hard to solve Space Invaders. Asteroids would be an interesting challenge. A computer playing Centipede perfectly would be very impressive (if it had to physically spi

... thou it deserves a way better tetris algorithm. The current one fails a lot, specially for level 1.

That is what I thought as well watching the video, why put the straight in a line on top of another.
Also, it seems pretty slow to move things around, is this why he is showing it on level 1? Does it not move fast enough for later levels?

For all the tech geeks out there interested in volunteering there is a great program called First Lego League to help gets kids get excited about technology. The program uses the Lego NXT kit like in the video. Legos + robotics + getting kids excited about technology = win.

It'd be interesting to make a bot like this that plays MMOs or something equally repetitive -- is that against terms of service? How would they know?

I remember making a "robot" to beat Ruby Weapon in FF7, which consisted of a coffee cup pressing the X button -- the fight took 2 hours thanks to summon animations.

Wouldn't that just attack? No summons no inv and you would get owned? Plus I mean if you wanted to cheese an optional boss that was just there for you to have fun with there are many ways to end the fight quickly. Lucky 7s, Vincent bug, etc.

Nope. You put cursor on "memory". You let every party member die except 1. After the you have one party member left, you use the materia allowing you to multisummon. The first summon puts the boss to sleep (hades? It's been a while) but does little damage. 2nd summon does damage of your choice (bahamut? Doesn't matter really. You could actually beat it with just hades, but it does so little damage...)

Mime. With sufficient haste, you can then simply mime again for the rest of the fight. Ruby never

A bot to do this for a more complicated games like FPSs would be interesting. To play well would involve solving a number of AI/computer vision problems. The bot would have to pick out enemies from the image it was seeing, it would have to figure out where it was on the map from visual cues and determine where to go, and so on. It would be a simplification of the problem of creating a robot that can intelligently navigate its environment, with the actual physical robot abstracted away to "push the stick fo

Sorry folks, but while I'm a total n00b when it comes to robots, I believe I could come up with a much better Tetris solving programm in a single day. Is it just me or is that bot really bad at Tetris?

Probably the least interesting part is the algorithm to play Tetris. Could you do a better job in a day? Maybe. The interesting part is the DSP/robot aspect of it. Anyone can write a program to play checkers or chess or whatever. Getting the program to rely on external sensors and be able to manipulate its environment...now that's cool.